Recently, the facet search or facet browsing has become a popular paradigm to browse large collections of semi-structured or structured data representing business objects (such as products, documents, companies, etc.). This paradigm lies in organizing the business objects in orthogonal category taxonomies called facets, for example, it is disclosed in the article “Publishing Museum Collections on the Semantic Web—The Museum Finland Portal” by Eero Hyvönen et al, WWW conference 2004, and in the article “Faceted metadata for image search and browsing” by Lee, K.-P., K. Swearingen, K. Li & M. Hearst, Proceedings of CHI 2003, all of which are incorporated herein by reference. In the disclosed techniques, users can easily express their queries by selecting and combining different categories within the given facets and refine their queries step by step until reaching a satisfactory set of solutions.
FIG. 1 shows one example of a prior art facet browsing. In FIG. 1, a user enters a query “ibm”, the resulting categories include a plurality of facets, for example, categories, price ranges, brands, stores and seller rating, etc., these facets and the order of which are all predefined. There are a number of categories corresponding to each browsing path, for example, the price ranges include under $800, $800-$1400, $1400-$2000, $2000-$4000, over $4000, or the user can input his or her own price range.
Usually, facet search is based on a predefined (manual) selection of a limited number of facets. This method was satisfying within a limited scope, it can not be dynamically applied to new or updated business objects. Actually, the business objects can often be dynamically created or updated by external users (partners) and be composed of a large number of properties or relationships, which can create hundreds or even more potential facets.
Additionally, facets are usually defined as simple features of the objects. The notion of browsing path, more generic than facet, which includes facets and complex facets obtained by composing several features of the objects.
Therefore, predefining browsing paths and their corresponding categories to browse the data becomes cumbersome and may not reflect the current change of objects. On the contrary, the automatic listing of all possible browsing paths will be confusing for users, the user can not find one or several browsing paths he needs from a large number of browsing paths, and can not make a smooth navigation.